Every online business requires a strategic approach and SEO Success to increase conversion opportunities, appear in the top organic search results on Google, and generate more leads. It seems difficult to rank higher within Google search results as it utilizes over 200 factors in its algorithms for ranking websites.
According to Statista, Google currently owes 86.6% of the total search engine market. You are likelier to make your brand/business visible if you follow Google’s rules. Businesses invest in paid advertising to create brand awareness and boost their conversions. You can achieve all these perks without investing in paid advertising.
SEO (search engine optimization) is an excellent marketing strategy that aims to improve your users’ navigation and search experience. Google is the most reliable and popular search engine worldwide, where millions of searches are being proceeded daily. For every search made by users, the platform organizes the results by ranking the answers best-fitted with searchers’ needs. Users’ have great trust in Google’s search results; that’s why the first three ranking results receive 30% of all click-throughs.
Google’s search engine allows you to boost your visibility and receive more organic traffic to your sites. Good quality content is not enough to rank higher in Google search engine results. To achieve all these perks, you must prove to Google that your answers fit best with the users’ searches.
SEO is vital for SEM (search engine marketing), which covers all marketing strategies, including sponsored links and paid ads.
You must be interested to know how to have SEO success with Google. Continue reading to know Google’s ranking factors and proven tips to rank higher in Google search results.
Ranking Factors of Google Algorithms
On-Page Factors For SEO Success
On-page ranking factors are embedded in the content of the page. These factors include;
- Rich snippets
- URLs
- Images
- Heading tags
- Meta description and titles
- Content
The on-page ranking factors help Google analyze if the page offers relevant information and a good user experience.
Off-Page Factors
Unlike on-page ranking factors, off-page factors are not in the page’s content. They only highlight the page status as a reference. These factors include;
- Direct search
- Social signs
- Brand mentions
- Diversity of backlinks
- Context of backlinks
- Number of backlinks
Google uses off-page ranking factors to highlight the site’s level of authority.
Benefits of Search Engine Optimization
Without SEO, you can’t show how nicely your website’s content meets the users’ needs. No one will ever find your website/page if the search engine doesn’t crawl, rank, or index it. SEO is essential as it:
- Improves the overall users’ experience of your website
- Assist you in receiving higher SERP rankings
- It helps you drive traffic and earn clicks
- Enables you to excel from your competitors
- Builds your audience and expands your business market
- Increases the customer’s engagement rates
In short, search engine optimization gives you all the perks needed to increase your brand’s visibility, attract a loyal audience, and achieve your revenue goals.
Proven ways to have SEO Success with Google
SEO is a productive digital marketing tactic with an ever-changing beast. You need to focus on off-page and on-page SEO tactics to rank your website in Google search results.
On-Page SEO Tips for Tailored Results
1. Focus on Top of the Funnel Keywords
The top-of-the-funnel keywords include the decision, consideration, and awareness phases. These top-of-the-funnel phrases grab visitors’ attention. Content that revolves around the top-of-the-funnel keywords can easily build awareness around the topic. These keywords tend to have higher search volumes, so they help you;
- Draw in users in their research process
- Target a larger audience at once
- 95% of marketers believe creating content focusing on top-of-funnel keywords can help you rank higher in search engines.
- You should follow a strategic approach when choosing the top-of-funnel keywords.
- Design at least three “top of the funnel” customer personas to ensure that the type of customer you want to sell matches the search query.
- Choose keywords with low SEO competition but greater search volumes
- Design a list of additional terms related to your selected keywords to determine the conversion rate.
2. Use Internal Links
The dwell time (time users spend on your website) is an essential metric Google uses to rank your website. It helps Google determine your content’s relevance and quality. You can embed internal links in your blog posts and other website content to enable your visitors to stay longer on your site.
More than 80% of the SEO experts say that including 2-5 internal links into your blog posts can help you see the tailored results. Along with in-depth and engaging content, linking to relevant internal content is the key to increasing the time spent on your sites.
Follow the below-given tips to leverage an internal link to your site;
- Avoid using anchor texts like “read more” or “click here.”
- Use natural and engaging anchor text.
- Use pages with additional but relevant content
By linking to internal content, you help visitors have a meaningful and deeper interaction with your content. It can encourage them to leave a comment on your blog post or share it with others on different social media platforms.
3. Use Multiple Media Types
Using multiple media types across your blogs is a productive way to benefit your ranking on the Google search engine. Multiple media types such as GIFs, audio files, videos, and ebooks can keep the users engaged and increase dwell time on your website.
Statistics reveal that 84% of people say that a brand’s video convinces them to make a purchase. Moreover, 86% of online retailers believe that video marketing is an excellent tool to grow faster and make the brand more visible.
You can include short audio and video clips in your blogs to help users better understand your products and simplify difficult concepts.
It would be great to embed YouTube videos and audio clips from the podcasts that cover the relevant topics to your blog posts.
4. Focus on Improving User experience
It is essential to improve the user experience for SEO success with Google. Google analyses your website’s dwell time (the time spent on your page) along with many other ranking factors. If users/visitors are not spending enough time on your websites, Google signals that the content is not tailored to the users’ searches.
The load time of your website can significantly affect bounce rates and dwell time. A web design survey shows that over 88.5% of visitors do not stay on websites with slow loading. A recent analysis reveals that a web page takes about 27.3 seconds to load fully on mobile and 10.3 seconds on a desktop.
The first five seconds of your page loading significantly impact your conversion rates. Each additional second your page takes to load can drop the conversion rate by 4.42% each time.
You can follow the following tips to create a greater user experience;
- Avoid using distracting images or redundant fonts
- Make the page easy to navigate
- Reduce image size
- Add relevant information at the top of the page
- Include relevant content and images
UX has become the crucial component in determining the ranking of your page on Google search engine result pages.
5. Add Relevant Keywords in Headers and Alt Text
The header of the page provides context to search engine bots. When you include relevant keywords in the header of your page, it signals to Google that your content is tailored to the search terms.
Adding relevant keywords in headlines is important, but you should force keywords to fit if they don’t make sense. 36% of SEO experts say page headings are a significant component, so you must avoid keyword stuffing in this section at any cost.
You should follow a strategic approach to add relevant keywords in headers;
- Add the industry-specific, relevant, and high-ranking keywords in the header
- Use keyword variations to give a powerful impact
Before deciding where to place relevant keywords and their variations, you should consider Google recommendations and user experience.
The alt text (altering text) has more than a 20% effect on your page’s rankings in search engines. It is a powerful tactic for SEO that make your website easily accessible. You can include specific keywords in the altering text to write an optimized description of the image you used.
6. Focus on Longtail Keywords
Longtail keywords might have lower search volume, but they deliver satisfactory results. They are more specific than the usual target keyword to identify why users do a specific search.
In the early days of the internet, longtail keywords account for only lower search volume, but some recent surveys reveal that 91.8% of all searches generate from these keywords. You must be very careful when leveraging the longtail keywords in your content, as it can have the opposite effect.
Follow the below-given considerations to add longtail terms to your current content;
- Identify the topic of your blog post.
- Enter the most relevant title of your topic into a keyword research tool
- Identify the low competition longtail terms relevant to your topic
- Narrow the keywords down to those related to your chosen topics
- Write the content based on your selected longtail keywords
Off-Page SEO Tips to get SEO Success
Off-page SEO is a quick win that optimizes all the signals outside your website for Google search engines. Specific off-page SEO techniques can improve your website rankings in the Google search engine.
1. Find and Eliminate Spammy Backlinks
Backlinks can be the hidden treasure to have SEO success with Google. More than 50% of pages/websites never receive organic traffic from Google because the pages don’t use any backlink. The quality of backlinks matters more than anything else. That’s why it is essential to be very mindful when taking action on requests for backlinks. As a website owner, you can receive requests for backlinks from other website owners whose website use shady SEO techniques or has a lower domain authority.
Ask your affiliates to add the correct HTML tag to ensure the quality of backlinks. You must ensure that your website’s backlinks have different types of anchor text copy. You can also run an audit or use a backlink checker tool to identify what type of backlinks your website is currently having. A broken or spammy backlink can negatively impact the Google search engine ranking of your website.
2. Diversify the Backlink Profile
The diversity of backlink profiles is a way of using as many backlinks as possible to have a random footprint that the Google algorithms cannot penalize. This strategy facilitates in Google ranking process by preventing any roadblocks.
It is significant to get links from directories to diversify your backlink profile. Perform competitor analysis to identify what kind of backlinks they use and where they get them—target websites similar to your competitors to link back to you.
3. Use social media Power
People are spending a lot of hours surfing social media platforms. You can leverage them to build website authority and boost the reach of your content. Social media engagement is an efficacious off-page SEO tactic that can help you improve your website ranking.
Social media platforms help you generate more organic traffic on your website and get more clicks to your content. When people start mentioning your brand/business on social media, it gives you an edge in the Google search engine. You can use infographics, engaging content, appealing video clips, and relevant hashtags to enhance your presence on different social media platforms. Using the power of social media, you can see a visible improvement in your off-page SEO efforts.
Bottom Line
Google checks more than 200 ranking factors to identify whether your content is tailored to users’ searches or not. It would help if you played by Google’s rules to have SEO success with this search engine. Once you improve your website’s on-page and off-page SEO, you can easily nurture quality leads in the top searches on Google. Implement the strategies mentioned above to have SEO success with Google.